Product Description

One year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney participated in a teaching exchange between Harvard and Hangzhou University. At Hangzhou she was able to overcome her students' usual rigidity and achieve a rare and intimate glimpse of their culture and their attitudes. This remarkable memoir captures both the dreams and the grim realities her Chinese students faced within the confines of an oppressive political regime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295874 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Mahoney spent a year in China teaching English at Hangzhou University, one year prior to the massacre at Tiananmen Square. She found her students earnest, polite, fatalistic, resigned to their dependency on parents and the state. Many were sharply critical of their government, but feared the consequences of outspokenness or protest. While teaching a class on the collapse of the Third Reich, her students unanimously chimed, "Hitler was a great man." She visited a women's prison where inmates, having committed "acts harmful to marriage and family" (presumably premarital sex), were "re-educated." Everywhere she went she found tremendous poverty and backwardness, people suffocating under rules and regulations. With novelistic gifts and an eye for the telling detail, she captures the texture of daily life in a memorable odyssey.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Mahoney's book has the form of books such as Mark Saltzman's Iron and Silk ( LJ 2/1/87, and one of LJ 's "Best Books of 1987"): the teacher or student abroad discovers Chinese society as seen through a year in one of its darkest corners, a provincial foreign languages department. To Mahoney, China is at times baffling, infuriating, and repellent. Her Chinese characters have the intensity of a medieval miniature, incised with short taut strokes of saturated color, while the deployment of incident, rhythm of character revelation, and development of the narrator are those of a crafty novelist. Since Mahoney discovers that to love China is to weep, her book is not the heartwarming one Saltzman's was; it is a deeper, more difficult, and perhaps a more lasting evocation of the country. Highly recommended for public library collections.
- Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, Ill.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
ROSEMARY MAHONEY is the author of Whoredom in Kimmage, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the New York Times Notable Book The Early Arrival of Dreams. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, she lives in Rhode Island.

Customer Reviews

She's only human...
Rosemary Mahoney went to teach English in Hangzhou University, a year before Tiananmen Square, and came back with enough information to fill a book. Which she does. Write a book that is. Most of it is very interesting and, sometimes, enlightening. The students and their ideas about the world, China's place in the world and their place in Chinese society are all very interesting and this book adds greatly to my library of books on Asia and on China's culture.
But you must understand that she didn't start out with the idea of reading a book so much of what she had in the book is based on memory, a detailed journal and letters. So you wonder how much of the details, including the verbal exchanges between her and her students, are truly what was said. And sometimes she seems to write something without truly thinking about what she put down.
For example she complained that many of the Chinese she dealt with treated her like a kid. But many of the Chinese she dealt with were teachers. And all knew this was her first time in China and knew she couldn't speak Chinese. Have you ever dealt with teachers? My parents were both teachers. It's not like they can just switch off being a teacher. Of course many of them were going to talk to her like she was a lost kid. She was LOST much of the time.
And on top of that, much of the dialogue she seems to have with other people, seems to show her treating THEM as children. Maybe she had gone into teacher mode. Maybe she felt the need to be nosey. Maybe she was didn't know when to stop asking questions. Many times I would stare at the book and feel sorry for the Chinese, asking myself, did she just SAY that? Is that REALLY how things went? Or is that just how she remembered things?
Still it is a must for anybody interested in Asian or Chinese culture and history. Just get it used.

Good Preparation
We have some friends who are joining the Peace Corps and heading out to China to teach English in the next few weeks. And even though this book was written nearly 20 years ago I think it gives an excellent picture of the people and the situation in which they will find themselves in. For such a short time Ms. Mahoney certainly speaks of the experience in ways that make the people and the culture there come alive. I'm grateful for this book.

Great Read-- Mahoney at her best!
After reading (skimming sometimes) through Mahoney's The Singular Pilgrim, A Likely Story, and Whoredom in Kimmage, I almost didn't pick this one up. Even though I enjoyed Mahoney's tales and writing style, I didn't feel like laboring through it all once again to read about China, a country that I had little interest in. Even while my general interest in Ireland and religion (topics of her other books) was higher, I found myself not able to stop reading The Early Arrival of Dreams. The perspective she has on Chinese youth and her year living there were wonderful and interesting. I devoured this book and was left wanting to read more about China.

Definitely her best work!!!